This chapter focuses on Perspectives USA, a magazine published from 1952 to 1956 by the Ford Foundation-funded nonprofit organization Intercultural Publications and edited by James Laughlin (founder ...
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This chapter focuses on Perspectives USA, a magazine published from 1952 to 1956 by the Ford Foundation-funded nonprofit organization Intercultural Publications and edited by James Laughlin (founder of New Directions Books and the most important publisher of modernist literature in America). The magazine sought to present the spectrum of American modernism across the genres, from literature to painting to architecture to product design, through original features and reprinted pieces. Laughlin showcased the great achievements in American art of the previous decades to persuade skeptical European audiences that the United States indeed had an advanced artistic scene worthy of respect. Even more than Encounter, Perspectives formalized modernism, voiding it of content and presenting it as a style common to experimental poetry and kitchenware design, abstract expressionist painting, and residential architecture.Less

Perspectives USA and the Economics of Cold War Modernism

Greg Barnhisel

Published in print: 2015-02-24

This chapter focuses on Perspectives USA, a magazine published from 1952 to 1956 by the Ford Foundation-funded nonprofit organization Intercultural Publications and edited by James Laughlin (founder of New Directions Books and the most important publisher of modernist literature in America). The magazine sought to present the spectrum of American modernism across the genres, from literature to painting to architecture to product design, through original features and reprinted pieces. Laughlin showcased the great achievements in American art of the previous decades to persuade skeptical European audiences that the United States indeed had an advanced artistic scene worthy of respect. Even more than Encounter, Perspectives formalized modernism, voiding it of content and presenting it as a style common to experimental poetry and kitchenware design, abstract expressionist painting, and residential architecture.

This book reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, and shows that this had profound implications ...
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This book reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, and shows that this had profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity. It draws on interviews, rare archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and the Voice of America. The book starts by showing how European intellectuals in the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. It then details how American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. It shows how they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. The book argues that, by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. It shows how they remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. It also documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.Less

Cold War Modernists : Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy

Greg Barnhisel

Published in print: 2015-02-24

This book reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, and shows that this had profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity. It draws on interviews, rare archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and the Voice of America. The book starts by showing how European intellectuals in the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. It then details how American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. It shows how they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. The book argues that, by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. It shows how they remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. It also documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.